The main themes of this blog are: operating systems, software applications, cellphones, smartphones, microprocessors and hardware. This is a blog about my thoughts on the mentioned subjects. I also post about IT projects I'm working on.

Posts Tagged ‘intel 8080’

Segmenting is a memory management technique which microprocessors use to address more than 64kilobytes memory.In this example I will demonstrate how
Intel 8086 accomplishes addressing more than 65K memory.

A memory word is addressed by addressing by adding a segment pointer and a word address as shown
in the picture.

The possibility of addressing one megabyte doesn’t necessary mean that the processor has a physical memory of 1MB.
You can make a program as if the processor had 1MB of memory and the
processor can fetch the segment that is being addressed from the computers hard drive.

Like this:

Another lesson on microprocessors and the intel8080 especially. The Intel 8080 has 40pins which enables it communicate with the outside world. The processors is 16bit bits internally but it only has enough pins on the databuss to fetch 8bits at a time. The processor is able to process 16bit instructions by fetching two 8bit memory positions after each other through use of a technology called multiplexing. The problem is that the multiplexing technology is slow so at best the intel 8080 is only a little bit faster than an 8bit processor of similar specifications. The only way of speeding up the Intel 8080 and making it able to load 16bits at a time from memory would be to give it more pins to communicate with the outside world.

I’ve read some more on how 8080 process JMP instructions. I’ve also read a comparsion on the architecture of motorola 6800, z80 and in8080. The 6800 has a few number of registers compared to z80 and intel8080 which have a similar number of registers. It is an interesting fact that these microprocessors have roughly the same performance but with different designs. You should also note that roughly the same speed is meant as an average and thah some of these might perfom better than the other hen it comes to certain operations.

In this blogg you will find my thoughts on various IT related topics. I will also write about various projects that I'm working on. From time to time I might also write on other topics that interest me such as as teaching, history, social science, mathematics, science and so on.,